Through blank verse, a young Jewish girl's story of surviving World War II by passing as a Christian

Passover starts tonight, and for a quiet shared moment of reading after the seder, “Odette’s Secrets” is a thoughtful book based on the true story of Odette Myers, a French Jewish girl who hid in plain sight from Nazis and anti-Semetic fellow citizens.

Maryann MacDonald’s “Odette’s Secrets” begins with little Odette at age 5, living happily with her parents and doll in central Paris. Returning from the public paths where they bathe once a week, they pass a furniture store, windows shattered. When Odette asks her mother who vandalized the store, her mother replies, “People who hate Jews. The owner of the store is Jewish.”

And fissures start to crack Odette’s pleasant life. Her papa enlists to fight against the Germans. Food grows scarce. The park where Odette spends hundreds of hours playing now has a sign, “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.” Odette seeks solace in the arms of the woman she calls her godmother (!), who becomes her family’s protector.

When Germans begin raiding apartments, tearing apart Jewish families and deporting them to concentration camps, Odette’s mother hastily sends her to a rural village, Chavagnes-en-Paillers, where Odette learns to pass as a Catholic girl, and to swallow her questions about the whereabouts of her mother, her father, her aunts, uncles and cousins.

When the Nazis finally find their way to the town that hosts the country school Odette attends, the locals are united in their fear of the troops. As the soldiers goose-step past the classrooms, Odette’s teacher begins pounding her fists on her desk. Odette recognizes the cadence of “La Marseillaise,” a small but courageous bit of rebellion, not unlike Odette’s act of defiance and deception.